The Great Indian Wedding: An Invitation

To Jaipur, where your wedding wardrobe takes shape: sherwanis and lehengas fitted at the family's own tailor, safa (turban) tying practised until it stays up, jewellery — real or rented, both honourable — matched at the family jeweller. Evening dance rehearsal: the sangeet has a group number, and you are in it.

The celebrations open: mehndi in the haveli^✦haveliA traditional mansion built around courtyards, its fortunes tied to merchant and noble families. The painted havelis of Shekhawati and the sandstone…Read in the glossary ↗ garden, your hands hennaed among the aunts as the singing starts; then the sangeet — a palace lawn, a stage, three generations performing rehearsed numbers with unrehearsed joy, your group number surviving contact with the audience. You came as guests; by midnight you are cousins.

The day itself. You ride in the baraat — the groom's procession of brass band, drummers and a white mare — dancing the kilometre to the venue because walking it is not permitted. Then the pheras: fire, Sanskrit, seven circuits, the couple bound scarf-to-scarf, and a thousand-person dinner where you now know forty people by name.

Farewells to the family — emotional, with breakfast — then the drive south through the Aravallis to Udaipur and the Lake Palace, the traditional address of the newly celebrated. An afternoon of nothing: the lake, the spa, the slow replay of three days that already feel legendary.

A gentle day among the sights the wedding eclipsed: the City Palace's mirrored chambers, the old city's silver lanes where wedding jewellery is born, a private cooking session recreating three dishes from the feast — recipes transcribed for home — and a farewell dinner afloat as the palaces light up.

Departure day — vidaai, the send-off, which Indian tradition insists be tender. The album arrives before you board: the family's photographers included you throughout, and the frames prove what the week already established — you didn't watch an Indian wedding; you were in one.